MinneBar 2007 Followup

Originally published on: 4/24/2007 6:12:55 AM

On Saturday, I went to the 2007 edition of Minnebar. There have been Barcamp events all over the world. What's impressive about this year's Minnebar is that it was the 2nd biggest one EVER after Bangalore. Given that this isn't San Francisco or Seattle, getting the kind of turnout they did is pretty substantial.

I'd personally like to see a conference that's more on the Open Space model. There were rooms for and a whiteboard to organize ad hoc sessions, but the sessions were pretty much all scheduled and prepared in advance. The best session I attended was Garrick's on Designing for Use. *That* session was pretty much an open session to discuss problems people were having and try to find solutions. More sessions like that one would have been great.

After reading the Open Space book, I was really amped to want to do a technology conference on that model. Lots of people told me that what I wanted was to go to a BarCamp. After attending this one, I want to go to next year's, but this definitely wasn't what's described in the book. It was good, but not Open Space. I still want to see something on that model as I think it could be really engaging.

Of course, it looks like (to me) that both models (BarCamp and OpenSpace) have scalability issues as they pass that 200-300 person size. They can probably be overcome, but would require deliberate action.

At any rate, I ran a session myself on RESTful Web Development for about an hour. Exold posted his notes including a kind comment about my presentation/session:

A good session, and the first time that what REST really is has stuck. This mightÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve been due to the use of paper and Sharpie for diagramming, rather than the paradoxically underdone yet overdone PowerPoint one usually sees.

Given that the session was during the last time slot of the day, I wasn't feeling 100% and it was something like 85Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â°F in there, I didn't really feel like I was anywhere near the top of my game. I'm glad someone got something good out of it. I decided to ditch the whole Powerpoint approach and go with what works well for me: markers on the wall. I would have preferred a markerboard instead of paper tacked to the wall (ran out of space before we were done), but it apparently went OK.

I did do some recording of sessions, including mine. However, I haven't pulled them off of the recorder yet. I'll post a comment on this post when I do.

Comments

Ben Edwards
commented on 4/24/2007 I think that some other feedback I heard would also lend itself to the Open Space model. If we had 50 minutes sessions followed by 30 minutes (or more) of working time where people could apply things they learned. I actually think there are several ways to do this. Many sessions at barcamps are just discussions and not prepared in advance but even so, I think we could do more. I think just that there were so many sessions to choose from sorta made people feal like they didn't need to do anything else in the ad hoc rooms. Good thoughts!

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commented on 4/24/2007 [...] I’d also like to thank everyone that participated in the Designing for Use session. While 50 minutes was just enough to get warmed up, I think we had a pretty good conversation. Christopher Warren wrote up notes. That’s what unconferences are all about. Thank you. “Hopefully my mumblings about users ignoring information in HUDs…and the need to push as much information as possible into the world …itself were useful to someone.” - Josh Lee “The best session I attended was Garrick’s on Designing for Use. *That* session was pret... [...]